Q-Tip Unearths Kanye West’s Long Lost ‘Mama’s Boyfriend’

An outtake from 'My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy'

A great mythology surrounds Kanye West’s unreleased song “Mama’s Boyfriend.” He first performed it a cappella at Facebook headquarters in 2010 in what was one of the first public teases of material from the then-forthcoming My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. “Boyfriend,” however, never appeared on the album, a fan-made version “leaked” in 2011, and that was the last anyone heard about it. That is, until now.

Q-Tip, who produced the song, played roughly 90 seconds of “Mama’s Boyfriend” at his Red Bull Music Academy lecture, which you can watch in the video above at roughly the 1:37:00 mark.

According to Tip, the track went through various iterations during the recording of MBDTF; at one point Soulja Boy was featured. But in listening to the song, it’s easy to see why it was left on the cutting room floor: The beat is soulful and West’s lyrics are funny and lighthearted, a vibe much more akin to his debut College Dropout than the, uh, dark, twisted fantasies of his 2010 masterpiece. Which also means given the sound and subject matter of Yeezus(see: “Black Skinhead” and “New Slaves”) “Mama’s Boyfriend” probably won’t make it onto that album either.